Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me...Who Am I?: The Media's Obsession with Adoptee Identity

Every adoptees' goal in life should not be to chase something that never happened. You cannot recreate the past. It should not be presented that every single adoptee is the same, that our goals in life, interests, and involvement with our culture should be the exact same. It should not be presented as "correct" that a Chinese adoptee is doing a fan dance or singing traditional songs. Many people want nothing to do with it. Many non-adopted Asian people want nothing to do with their heritage as well. And yet, somehow, America swoons when She see adoptees "reconnecting" with their "heritage" as if this is the last piece in a puzzle, the last number in Sudoku...it is satisfying because it makes the public think that something makes sense and is right with the world.

These stories shouldn't be "Oh, what a tragedy she is unable to reconcile her identity with whatever she believes Asian means."It should be "Oh, what a tragedy, she doesn't know herself as a human being" and the news media should realize they are not making her job any easier.

Why is it so important that the public full of strangers polices adoptees' individual experiences? Why must the public feel entitled to hover over adoptees to make sure they are developing "right"? What does that even mean? Does it mean that the adoptee must like dumplings and learn Mandarin? Even when not all Chinese people speak Mandarin, and indeed my friends speak Cantonese and Fujianese. What does it mean about our society when perfect strangers feel at peace and fulfilled when they see an adoptee acting out their cultural role of fan dancer or ribbon dancer, like historical reenactments of women churning butter in a log cabin? Is your idea of "Asia" even accurate?

My birthparents could very well be Christian, but some adoptees want to chase Buddhism because they think that is what their parents practice. I could learn Mandarin! Just to learn my family actually speaks Cantonese (which would be likely because people in my orphanage spoke Cantonese...I'm from Canton). Is that version of the fan dance actually native to northern China or southern China? Realize that, at best, we are chasing an ideal or a fantasy. Without facts, chasing the idea of "Asian" is probably not an extremely accurate way of recreating our alternative childhood as a Chinese girl who was raised in China.

 I have no basis to go on. I could imagine them growing up in rural, farming China like in Disney's Mulan...when they could very well be living in the United States, working at Trader Joe's!

Look, I love dumplings! But why should the story about a Chinese adoptee liking culturally "correct" food fly off the shelves when adoptees who express feelings of sadness get labelled as "ungrateful" and are silenced? I know plenty of adoptees and no two are alike. Some, indeed, have highly dysfunctional families, just like other non-adoptee families I know. Yet, we don't hear about them. Can you imagine? "Next, on NBC, we sit down with an adoptee who has a lacklustre relationship with her adoptive mom! Stay tuned!"

No, no, no! We'd much rather have: "Adoptive Sisters Separated At Birth!" Like some kind of sci-fi freak show. Can we please abandon the over-used tropes of turning our very real and very authentic lives into movie plots? You know, for every single story? And what the Hell is wrong with people that they think watching two young girls, much too young to give fully informed consent, reunite on stage is anything but barbaric. Like watching a lynching. People can't get enough. Give these girls some respect. They aren't rabbits in a cage that jump when you say jump. Oh, but it's beautiful! You say. For ratings, perhaps, but the public eats them and spits them out. If they struggle later in life, too bad, we'll say, we aren't publishing that, we'll say. Why aren't you happy and grateful, we'll say. The family went on television so that they could reunite without paying a cent. But it came at the cost of their daughters' privacy. ABC's "Twin Sisters Separated at Birth Reunite Live on GMA!"

Do you see the tears streaming down their faces? Oh, but it's such fun, you say! Oh, how beautiful, you say! It is easy to wrangle a baby or a young child onto a television set and talk about adoption like they have no voice. It seems that when adoptees find their own voices, everyone leaves the room. No more news media. No one wants to hear from them again, unless it is about race. No one wants to hear that they are unhappy with their adoptive parents. No one wants to hear about therapy. They only want the fairy tale.

So give them a call (I'm looking at you, NPR) if you're having an existential racial identity crisis, or you found your birth-family. We love a good reunion story. People cry over the reunions of birth-families. And yet, it seems as if people don't recognize that there is a deep trauma in the tears. The public would rather eat the adoptees whole, their story, their fairy tale, their struggles with race, and their reunification with their birth-family, and spit them out. No one cares about the quiet in-between.

Wait, wait, don't tell me! I don't know who I am! And in a year, I still won't know who I am! Because I'm fulfilling America's ideal of racial limbo!
Stories that add up to "Every adoptees' goal in life should be to reach for their preconceived biased stereotypical notion of what their roots should be. What a shame if they cannot speak their native language. One day they'll come to their senses and realize that their entire value rests upon their ability to recreate CHINA within themselves."

NBC: In Search of Self, Chinese Adoptees Find Shifting Identities
NPR PRI's The World: Born Chinese, Raised American, an Adoptee Explores Her Identity
NPR: For Chinese-American Adoptees, Matters Of Identity
Huffington Post: The Struggle For Identity As An Asian-American Adoptee
The Odyssey: Identity Crisis Of A Chinese Adoptee
CNN: Adopted from China: Finding identity through heritage
The New York Times: Chinese Adoptees at Home in America
I think you get the point...

Everyone must find who they are. Adoptees, non-adoptees, everyone. But it seems like adoptees aren't free to build their own stories. They have pre-written scripts and paths already carved out for them by society of what they should be and should aim to be. Most of this is fueled by the public's insatiable demand for more tears, more drama, more heart-warming fuzziness Then, when the adoptee finds themselves and is no longer in racial limbo and is able to say "I know myself."

The reporters go home.

No one wants to hear it.

I cannot wait for the day when there are more stories about adoptees who know who they are than there are stories about adoptees who don't know who they are. Imagine if we treated non-adoptees the way we treated adoptees...

"Chad Grew Up with His Birthfamily in Central PA and HE DOESN'T KNOW WHO HE IS."

Thousands of Chads around the world all struggling to find their place in the world! Next, on NPR.